The problem with building a bridge between church and state.
How political identity once drove Americans out of Christianity—and why that’s no longer true.
The core function of religion has not primarily been moral instruction or existential comfort but managing relationships with supernatural agents.
World of Woo: When and why some people trust fame more than evidence.
Environment: The report oil companies are worried about: Climate attribution science.
Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy.
“As the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of our ignorance. Of course, Einstein would have used AI. Using it does not mean outsourcing critical thought.
For hundreds of years, thinkers have hoped to find God in the machine and now many people are forming bonds with LLMs.
The Search for Consciousness. Neuroscience is becoming very good at drawing the map but the map is not the territory.
Coffee Break Videos: Psych Ward Jesus. The non-identity problem. Three atheists discuss “Who wrote the Bible”. (I always enjoy listening to an expert!).
Of course, Einstein would have used AI. Using it does not mean outsourcing critical thought.
I think there is no way Einstein could have come up with his theories if he used AI to do his thinking. AI summarises things well; but that means it only comes up with clichés. It doesn’t do any original thinking, beyond summarising what’s already there in an original way.
Einstein’s originality did not emerge from knowing nothing that had gone before. He ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ like Maxwell and Lorentz and others. Much of his work was reorganizing existing ideas around problems they had not fully resolved. For years Einstein clung to the prevailing cliché that the universe must be static. He later called that his “greatest blunder”. If he had an AI subscription it would have told him something like “Albert, you have added the cosmological constant to preserve a prior assumption. Remove that assumption and examine the unmodified equations.” In that case, the LLM would not have done his thinking for him. It would have challenged the cliché that was obstructing it.
Feynman’s principle is the right standard: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Confirming a prediction strengthens a model. Refuting it removes a bad path, reveals a hidden assumption, or forces a better question. Both outcomes reduce uncertainty. Proving something correct or incorrect is a win for Science.
I guess we could call on Feynman again with his cure for ‘metacognitive laziness’ and get students to learn the Feynman Technique first?
Explain the idea in plain language.
Notice where the explanation becomes vague.
Return to the source and repair the gap.
Explain it again without hiding behind jargon.
AI could be built into that process rather than used to bypass it. That way AI stops being an answering-machine and become an examiner.
Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy.
The latest news about Erica Schwartz and her hearing in Washington, DC is just flat-out disturbing!
This woman Erica Schwartz has spent her entire life in Medicine and in service to the nation in the U.S. Armed Forces literally breathing, eating, drinking, exercising, and metabolizing Medicine and Military Life.
Yet she didn’t give a straight answer on whether she would uphold Medical Science over the whims of Bobby Brainworm, The Great and Wonderous Oz, and The Naked Orange Emperor.
Either Erica Schwartz is too deep into her life’s work to know that she is in a den of wolves or someone got a hold of her and twisted her arm.
Zoom in on the necklace pendant she wore. Could someone be evoking history’s most ancient hatred against her?
Are they offering Erica Schwartz a Hobson’s Choice to either be a Court Jew for MAGA and MAHA or be Kosher dog food for Woke Wolves of the Left and Right?
Erica Schwartz should have stuck with private practice or even retired to the good life. Washington, DC wants sycophancy over expertise.
Wouldn’t AI in Einstein’s time have also held to all the assumptions of all the previous giants in Physics and Cosmology? Would AI independently question those assumptions?
Yes, I think so. It think that is a very good question. An AI trained only on pre-1905 knowledge might be less capable than one trained today, because modern AI can challenge classical assumptions partly because its training already contains Einstein’s challenge. When present-day AI suggests questioning absolute simultaneity, it is not independently recreating relativity; it is drawing upon a world in which relativity is already established.
Einstein plus AI would probably have been stronger than either alone. His genius was seeing that the clocks were the problem. He escaped the cuckoo clock of inherited mechanics while most physicists were still redefining the shadows in Plato’s Cave. (I had to include that line because it sounded good in my head!).
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